Garbage collectors are being trained by police to be on the lookout for terrorists in the run-up to this year’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. The terrorist depicted in the role playing scenario used to train garbage workers is a young white woman while her victim is a Middle Eastern man.

“Anarchists, terrorists and plain old thieves and creeps, your new foe wears work boots and fluorescent vests. Meet the garbage men,” reports the Tampa Bay Times, noting that police are involved in training garbage collectors to “spot suspicious activity on their routes” in preparation for this August’s RNC in Tampa.

Told that the Waste Management company itself could be a target, workers were shown examples of “suspicious” activity which included a man taking pictures of a garbage truck and were ordered to be on the lookout for anyone “taking an undue interest in our bins.”

Workers were told not to get involved in any potential incident, merely to report the suspicious activity to police.

The fact that the training video showed to the workers also outlined a scenario, “showing an image of a young white woman who was a suicide bomber, a young Middle Eastern man who was a victim,” is becoming par for the course.

On completion of training, garbage workers get a certificate confirming their status as a ‘Waste Watch’ snoop and also receive a special baseball cap.

Garbage workers are already being used by large companies and the state to spy on American citizens across the country. Local authorities across the U.S. are using cutting edge technology to spy on the contents of people’s trash cans and issue them with fines for non-compliance.

Such programs are already in place in major cities such as Miami Beach Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Ohio, Boise, Idaho, and Flint, Michigan, where ‘trash supervisors’ are dispatched to intimidate homeowners and issue them with fines for failing to recycle properly.

The First Observer program has previously been used by the TSA on America’s highways, most recently in Tennessee for the purpose of “bothering truck drivers and passengers by subjecting their cargoes to exhaustive searches,” as former Congressman Bob Barr wrote back in November.

Drivers were also recruited to become snitches under the auspices of “See Something, Say Something,” as VIPR teams (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) worked with the Tennessee Highway Patrol to oversee a process that has been criticized as an alarming sign of internal checkpoints becoming commonplace in America.

Before it was disbanded, Operation TIPS was designed to encourage people who had access to Americans’ homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, to report back to the authorities if they saw anything deemed “suspicious”.

As we have repeatedly warned, history shows that governments training citizens to spy on each other is a sign of a society in terminal decay. Such programs never lead to a more secure society, but instead breed suspicion, distrust, fear and resentment amongst the population. The only “benefit” that such programs have ever achieved is allowing the state to more easily identify and persecute political dissidents while discouraging the wider population from engaging in any criticism against the government.

Telling low paid government workers who, like garbage collectors, aren’t noted for their intelligence, that they are secret terrorist hunters for the state isn’t going to make anything more secure, it’s only going to affirm the fact that the United States is a banana republic decaying from within. If America is going to have an internal spy force watching the behavior of citizens, can’t it at least be professionally organized? I’m thinking KGB or Stasi.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.